In recent years, with the advent of more advanced wireless and land-line telephone systems, various call-waiting features have been added to phone services to enable telephone users to answer a second call which is received while a first call is still in progress. For example, with cell phones, it is common to provide a service where, if a first call is in progress, a second incoming call is brought to the phone user's attention by a series of “beeps” and a visual indication on the screen that a second call is waiting, including a display of the Caller ID number for the second call. This displayed Caller ID number then aids the phone user in determining whether to switch to the second call, or allow it to go to voicemail. These features function entirely within the realm of the telephone itself, in other words, other possible conversations which might be in progress on the part of the phone user which do not involve the phone itself are completely disregarded by the phone since the phone has no way of “knowing” anything about them. For example, a phone user might already be engaged in an important face-to-face conversation, or possibly an oral presentation to an audience, and not want to be interrupted by any incoming phone calls except those from a pre-determined list of “Priority Numbers.” Therefore it would be advantageous for a telephone to have the capability for recognizing when the phone owner (the “user”) is already engaged in a face-to-face conversation or an oral presentation and then immediately shunt an incoming call to voicemail without any audible or vibratory interruption of the user's activities. A further advantageous feature of an advanced telephone service would be an ability to modify this call-shunting activity for a certain set of important phone numbers, such as close family members or business colleagues. In the case of an incoming call from this select group of numbers, a “Priority List” could be pre-defined by the phone user so that when the Caller ID for an incoming call matches a number on the “Priority List” the phone owner would be notified as in the prior art, i.e., the incoming call would not be immediately shunted to voicemail, but instead would remain in a waiting state while the phone owner determines (based on the displayed incoming Caller ID number) whether or not to answer the call.